| The professional practice of psychology has often been thought to rely heavily on the existence of one's emotional ability to care and co-experience their client's emotions, or in the cognitive capacity to take the perspective of or imagine another's emotional state, or both. A great deal of research as explored the importance of empathy to positive therapeutic outcomes, however, an additional body of research in medicine and dentistry found a general decrease in empathy in their trainees over the course of their education, with particularly notable decreases following residency years. The current research aimed to examine to compare levels of emotional and cognitive empathy for psychology graduate students at each level of graduate training, expecting the greatest decreases following externship and internship years. Participants were recruited from all graduate departments at St. John's University, resulting in a final sample consisting of 216 participants from 21 areas of academic study. Participants were asked to provide demographic information and complete a self-report empathy measure. Regression analyses were used to test the hypothesis that cognitive empathy would increase over course of psychology graduate training and that emotional empathy would show a decrease when comparing students at different levels of training. Both psychology student status and an increase in the year of training were found to be significantly related to a decrease in emotional empathy. The findings as well as limitations of the current investigation are presented. Future directions and implications for school psychologists are discussed. |
